RUSH: Now, about the Iranians calling today National Nuke Day, Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online has an interesting observation about this, and I want to pass this on, because it sort of dovetails with where we are right now in dealing with genuine threats to our own national security. His basic point — I don’t want to read his whole piece here, but his basic point — is this is the exact reason we went into Iraq, to find and stop the production of weapons of mass destruction. Now, according to the, quote, unquote, ‘powers that be,’ there weren’t any in Iraq, and of course we know that there were. I don’t want to get into an argument about that. We know they’re somewhere, but the point is, the country was all for it. The country was all for a preemptive strike in Iraq, 90%, 80%, to stop weapons of mass destruction from being used in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Stanley Kurtz says, ‘In the debate to come over Iran’s nuclear capacity, there will be constant references to our intelligence failure in Iraq. The dispute will be about exactly how close Iran is to a bomb. But let nobody forget, Iran is already at a point that would easily have justified the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
‘This fact by itself doesn’t decide the issue of what to do about Iran. An attack on Iran would be militarily tougher than the invasion of Iraq. Occupation seems out of the question. But there are also questions about how far an attack would actually set back Iran’s nuclear program. All of these difficulties and considerations notwithstanding, the fact is that we are under a threat of exactly the sort that everyone agreed would justify action in Iraq.’ Now our hands are tied. Now we’re not going to do anything. It doesn’t appear we’re going to do anything. I know people who say that George W. Bush is not going to leave office with Iran in possession of nuclear weaponry. We’ll see. But clearly — and I made mention of this some years ago that the real basic problem with what the Drive-Bys and the left have done in destroying the Iraq war effort, is they’ve also destroyed any other attempt that we might need to make anywhere else around the world to accomplish the same thing. His point is, exactly what’s happening in Iran is exactly why we went into Iraq. Now our hands are tied. We will not do anything about it. Well, that’s not his point. It’s mine.
I think it’s an excellent point, and when you realize that within the population of the country there probably isn’t any kind of agreement that we need to stop Iran from getting a nuke. Yet there was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to stop Iraq from getting weapons of mass destruction. Don’t forget, there had been 14 years of ignored UN resolutions and so forth when the case was made, and the Iranians are doing the same thing. So now what we’re going to get is, ‘Well, our intelligence is wrong. Bush is just manufacturing it. Bush a warmonger. Bush wants to go in there,’ and we’re pretty much paralyzed —
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RUSH: We’ll move to Flowery Branch, Georgia. John, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Listen, you mentioned earlier in your program again these 15 service personnel from Britain, and I just wondered if you had ever entertained the thought that they were possibly planted there as bait to entice the Iranians to do something stupid, to facilitate a war with Iran?
RUSH: No.
CALLER: No?
RUSH: No.
CALLER: Why not?
RUSH: Well, where’s the war? Where is the idea that the Iranians goofed up here? It’s just the exact opposite. Everybody’s looking at it Iranians as the big winners here and the Brits as cowed.
CALLER: That’s what happened, yes. Those kids opened their mouths and made fools of themselves, and I think, you know, if that were the idea, that it blew up in our faces and in Britain’s faces, but —
RUSH: Wait a sec. This just falls under the conspiracy umbrella. For this to have been a conspiracy —
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: — somebody would have had to say, ‘Okay, look, you 15 go out there and stay in Iraqi waters,’ because they were in Iraqi waters when they were captured —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — and somebody would have to arrange for the Iranians to go capture them. How do you do that?
CALLER: Right. I just can’t understand why they didn’t defend themselves, and why they would go out there with no cover. They had to have some sort of cover. You know, 15 guys are not just going to go out in the ocean in a little boat and float around. (laughs) I mean it just doesn’t happen.
RUSH: But they did!
CALLER: I find it so hard to believe. It just seems like a setup, because we have such a problem with our reputation in the world (sigh) I don’t see how —
RUSH: It wasn’t us. It wasn’t us. This is the Brits. They practically mothballed their whole navy.
CALLER: Right, right.
RUSH: People asked me last week, ‘How can they do this?’ I said, ‘Just listen to this story and you’ll understand what’s happened to Britain and multiculturalism.’
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: By the way, the root of multiculturalism is not offending anybody.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I don’t know if you heard this last week, but the Brits, in their public school system, have stopped or are going to stop teaching the Holocaust. Do you know why?
CALLER: Why?
RUSH: Because Muslim students don’t believe it and they don’t want to offend them.
CALLER: Unbelievable.
RUSH: Well —
CALLER: Unbelievable.
RUSH: Now, this has been building. This didn’t just happen overnight.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: This culture has obviously affected their military, too, so when you go out not to offend anybody, and that’s what multiculturalism does, and here come the Iranians, ‘Oh, we can’t fire on them. Oh, we can’t offend them. We can’t cause any problems here.’
CALLER: Right. Well, that’s pretty awful when you’re in the middle of a war and you have to kowtow to people who are —
RUSH: Yeah, but we’re not in a war with Iran,
CALLER: Correct, correct.
RUSH: See, the real downside is… This was not an excuse to start a war. You wouldn’t do this with 15 Brits. You wouldn’t use 15 Brits as an excuse to start a war, unless — well, the war hasn’t started, and it didn’t start. Look at the way the Europeans handled this. They ran off to the UN. They ‘deplored’ it. They ‘condemned’ it. Yip yip yip yip yahoo! It’s the New Castrati way of dealing with things. Right now, the Iranians are the clear winners. Here’s Ahmadinejad giving a them going away gifts. There’s video of them playing ping-pong and eating fine food. They’re telling stories about how they were scared to death, guns cocking, a woman soldier, Marine thought a coffin was being built for her. But the Iranian video shows people wearing the favored leisure suit of Ahmadinejad. They outfitted them for that. They let them go, and a few days after here comes Ahmadinejad announcing today, ‘This is national nuclear day in Iran, and nobody’s going to stop us, and we’re going to defy all this,’ and why shouldn’t they say this? What they learned is — if anybody conducted an exercise here, it was the Iranians — ‘Hey, let’s go over and grab these 15 and see what happens. Let’s really test the mettle of these people.’
They found out that not only the 15 sort of apologized, confess and all this, their country didn’t do anything, really, didn’t talk tough, didn’t do anything. The world didn’t do anything about it. It goes back to an earlier story in the program, purpose of war is to kill people and break things, and to defeat the enemy’s will to fight. And I guarantee you, bin Laden said this on ABC TV in an interview with Jon Miller, after the opened in Mogadishu that led to the book and the movie Black Hawk Down. He said, ‘We learned the Americans won’t take casualties anymore. They have no stomach for it.’ Ahmadinejad has probably learned the same thing. They just think that we don’t have the will to engage in real warfare with anybody. They do think this about George Bush. That’s why they’re doing everything they can to endorse as many Democrats as possible. Aside from Bush, I think the lesson learned here was the lesson learned bay Iran, and the lesson they’re going to take from this is that nobody’s going to stop them and nobody’s going to do anything to them, so why should they stop on their own? Why shouldn’t they get nukes? And again, just to remind you what Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online said, folks. What’s happening in Iran is the exact reason we went into Iraq. Now there’s no gumption or desire for that, obviously, because of what’s happened in Iraq or what we’ve been told has happened.